[Many poets of the sixties] seem to be becoming somewhat fatigued by cerebral and mythopoeic poetry. There is a return to Imagism; and with that return lyricism inevitably canters alongside. (p. 33)

Of all contemporary Canadian poets, Milton Acorn is most at home as a part of this development…. As he describes it, he grew into poetry the hard, unschooled way:

I started to write in iambic patterns…. Iambic was theoretically based on the 'natural' rhythms of the English language…. But among the great majority of people living on the North American continent the speech patterns (stress and rhythm) have changed. Iambic no longer fits.

Acorn first began to break with the iambic pattern from listening to seamen talk…. His aim was "a line that flowed more in terms of their own natural idiom". [He] began to grow away from the iambic pattern, while yet maintaining a unity of structure based essentially on strong-stress (ballad) rhythms. (pp. 33-4)

Notable in [his poem "Charlottetown Harbour"] is the lack of overt emotion and the absence of metaphor or symbol. We are presented with a still-life painting in the Imagist tradition. Generally Acorn's early work seems to follow this Imagist pattern of minute detail, enclosing an internal movement which is created by the use of phrasal rather than clausal utterances. Yet Acorn is a poet unable to sit still for long: man interacting on scene is what really interests him. (p. 35)

Even in his first book it is apparent that Acorn's poetry is beginning to eschew description, or even simile and metaphor, in favour of a more dramatic presentation. The landscape is now acted upon, as in the poem, "Old Property"…. There is no internal juncture [in this poem as there is in some of Acorn's work] and even end-juncture is disguised by run-on lines…. The effect is to emphasize word or phrase at the beginning of the line. From now on, this will be one of Acorn's chief technical devices…. [In parts of this poem] he extends himself farther than imagism, into symbolism. And from there on he questions, questions. (pp. 35-6)

[There] are three aspects to Acorn's style, evident in both his early and his late poems. These are: vivid imagery, rhythmic progression, and the ability to create a synthesis of what has gone before…. [The] poet works on his material, activates it and re-creates it into a new synthesis. He succesfully integrates form and content. (p. 37)

It is as an experimentation with form that Milton Acorn's poems are particularly satisfying. In his great variety of presentation … there is no repetition; neither is there an amateur dilettantism. Rather, soaring through a variety of approaches a human search is evident: the search for enduring life. "The Fights" is a good example…. (p. 38)

This poem depends more than most in its rhythm, to create unity and strength. The natural speech units, the breath groups, have been "distorted" so as to lay strong stress beats on each line. This creates the over-all rhythmic pattern. (p. 39)

[Although] the poem lacks clausal balance, its phrasal proportions are heavily weighted and they are rooted in action. The tone of the poem is not "sublime" (as so often in Shelley), but classical, balanced, vigorously ironic. It could be a commentary on our whole way of life in the twentieth century. About man's aggressiveness it says little explicitly; yet it says all.

More Blakeian in style is the poem "For a Singer". Here is a poem that carries to completion the process begun in "The Fights" and developed in "I Shout Love". Although far from being the end of Acorn's development, "For a Singer" seems to mark a phase complete in itself: the phase of the conscious, social revolutionary poet defying the sickness of capitalist society. Of its shape—that of four-line stanzas in a four-beat, strong-stress measure, Acorn has remarked:

Tonally it is a unique experience for me in that it is a chant, an invocation. It depends not upon the natural flow of the voice, but upon the distortion of the stresses and intonation….

From [this poem's] images, startling in their unexpectedness, yet objectively viewed, the poet turns the camera inward to reveal his own feelings: the effect the singer is having on him. (pp. 40-1)

Although the syntax here might be criticized as being too elliptical, the lines pound their way home. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of this poem is the fact that its dialectical development, moving from its sense of post-Hiroshima despair towards a Utopian revolutionary optimism, is bound together structurally by unrhymed tetrameters, a free-flowing ballad rhythm. It is a poem built up, not on finite verbs and clausal structures, but on phrases; therefore we expect neither metaphysical intricacy nor classical balance, but fervour, incantation, excitement. What verbs there are are not verbs of action but of being, feeling, seeming, existing. Yet movement is created by the rock-a-bye effect of participles used as descriptive modifiers. Even to itemize them is interesting: clouds tossing; lightning shot; caressing; throbbing through. These and many other "ing" verbals rock out the rhythm of the poem. They are ongoing and lend themselves to chant, declamation, prophecy. Whilst they give an impression of motion, they do not move except as the ocean's floor may be said to move. The singer does not act, she seems to be caught up in the poet's vision, singing eternally on the brink of destruction. She is not a metaphor, but a symbol, proclaiming life.

This poem, "The Singer", a poem of affirmation and belief in humanity's struggle, is in the tradition of Blake and Whitman. Its metaphors of the Moloch worshippers "teetering on the last rung" in juxtaposition with the "firebird on the last cloud" emphasize the prophetic tone. That tone, though Marxist by implication, avoids didacticism and sentimentality [and is deliberately naïve]…. Acorn's aim is to bring objects, life itself, back into perspective so that we may look on them freshly, not cynically. Obscurity and mystification are not a part of this method. (pp. 41-2)

[Milton Acorn] is a poet who never stands still. Perilously near as he seems to come, sometimes, to a precipice of emotion too dizzying to be borne, miraculously he swings around. He marches on, laughing and crying, turning his back on clouds of glory to consider the internal, mental life of the dreaming man. (p. 42)